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vessels to carry her silks as well as presents for her favorite barbarian, Riod of the Inyx. The undertaking became an excuse for festivities, if Rim City needed a reason for a party, which it normally would not, except that dark times had befallen the city, the scene of riots and the Tarig quelling. All the more reason to be happy if circumstance allowed.
    On Sen Ni’s other side, Geng De had fallen asleep. He had gamely partakenof the feast and listened carefully to the Red Throne priests’ Admonitions for Travelers, but now, at the late hour, had closed his eyes.
    Sen Ni rose from her place. “The wash stall, Mother.”
    She made her escape through the crowd of merchants, officials, and hangers-on. Followed by Emar-Vod and another Hirrin guard, Sen Ni passed from the dining hall into the cool corridor, making straight for the wash stall so that no one would intercept her.
    In the Entire, bathrooms were very large and the various apparatuses for washing and relieving functions were extensive. All Sen Ni’s wash stalls had mirrors—an innovation. She splashed water on her face and dried herself, noting with annoyance her hair arrangement, a tangle of knots at the back of her neck along with colorful spiked tassels protruding. Riod would hardly recognize her when she went home.
    No, Riod knew her by her heart, so it hardly mattered that she looked like a mandarin princess who couldn’t sit a tall chair much less an Inyx. Silks so fine they wouldn’t survive an hour’s ride under the bright…
    Oh, Riod, my heart. Look what has happened. The Tarig felled. We found their weakness, the place they cross over. You found it, Riod. And my father used it to own the Entire. Look at me, a princess in silks. Presiding over platters of food…She yanked at the knots in her hair, throwing the tassels in the waste channel, and ran her hands through her hair, freeing it.
    By the time she got to her gardens, Emar-Vod had taken the correct measure of her mood, and held well back.
    Kicking off her shoes, Sen Ni walked barefoot on the soft ground cover, releasing a pungent scent of cloves. From between the trees came a glimmer of the sea, never far from sight on this great bridge over the Nigh. The orphanage lay beyond the garden, its scalloped roofs graceful against the Twilight Ebb sky. Geng De had urged her to start the home. Cynically, he was all for the public gesture; she had taken his measure early on. As a babe, he had fallen in the Nigh and came out minus a heart, but with a talent for weaving. A terrible trade. Yet she called him her brother because she needed his powers, now that her father had betrayed her, as Geng De had predicted he would.
    In moments of clarity she knew that it wasn’t father against daughter—a question merely of who would rule. It was about which world would survive.The Rose was vast and endowed with mass and sustaining economies of physics; the Entire was constructed, and would need resources from the Rose to sustain itself. The darklings should by rights share resources, but they would not. Even if they might claim they would, who would trust the Rose not to send a killing nan to eliminate a competitor? For this reason Helice Maki’s proposition to have it all burn immediately had been the Entire’s only true safety. But Helice was dead. And not only that, but Ahnenhoon was shut down. Soon, when Riod told the people what was at stake and how Titus Quinn had doomed them, the Entire would rise up and drive him off his throne.
    Given the justice of this cause, it seemed diabolically unfair that Titus was the one rogue strand , the one sentient whom Geng De couldn’t grasp in his hands. Why did heaven bestow such protection on Titus Quinn? Geng De was working very hard to tame that rogue strand, she knew.
    Approaching the garden gazebo, she glimpsed a shock of white hair in the bushes nearby. A very small child bent over a ball and, laughing, threw it up